“Instead, she starts getting me to do things. I don’t realize it at the time, but she starts setting me up. She asks if she can color my hair the same blond as hers, because mine’s mousy, and it’ll look so nice a brighter shade. And she starts complaining about her parents. I mean she’s always complained about her parents, but now she really gets going on them—how they only love her as an idea and not really for who she is—so she says she wants to mess with her parents. She has me start prank-calling her house, telling her parents I’m the new Amazing Amy. We’d take the train into New York some weekends, and she’d tell me to stand outside their house—one time she had me run up to her mom and tell her I was going to get rid of Amy and be her new Amy or some crap like that.”
“And you did it?”
“It was just dumb stuff girls do. Back before cell phones and cyber-bullying. A way to kill time. We did prank stuff like that all the time, just dumb stuff. Try to one-up each other on how daring and freaky we could be.”
“Then what?”
“Then she starts distancing herself. She gets cold. And I think—I think that she doesn’t like me anymore. Girls at school start looking at me funny. I’m shut out of the cool circle. Fine. But then one day I’m called in to see the headmistress. Amy has had a horrible accident—twisted ankle, fractured arm, cracked ribs. Amy has fallen down this long set of stairs, and she says it was me who pushed her. Hold on.
“Go back downstairs now. Go. Down. Stairs. Goooo downstairs.
“Sorry, I’m back. Never have kids.”
“So Amy said you pushed her?” I asked.
“Yeah, because I was craaaazy. I was obsessed with her, and I wanted to be Suzy, and then being Suzy wasn’t enough—I had to be Amy. And she had all this evidence that she’d had me create over the past few months. Her parents, obviously, had seen me lurking around the house. I theoretically accosted her mom. My hair dyed blond and the clothes I’d bought that matched Amy’s—clothes I bought while shopping with her, but I couldn’t prove that. All her friends came in, explained how Amy for the past month had been so frightened of me. All this shit. I looked totally insane. Completely insane. Her parents got a restraining order on me. And I kept swearing it wasn’t me, but by then I was so miserable that I wanted to leave school anyway. So we didn’t fight the expulsion. I wanted to get away from her by that time. I mean, the girl cracked her own ribs. I was scared—this little fifteen-year-old, she’d pulled this off. Fooled friends, parents, teachers.”
“And this was all because of a boy and some grades and a Thanksgiving invitation?”
“About a month after I moved back to Memphis, I got a letter. It wasn’t signed, it was typed, but it was obviously Amy. It was a list of all the ways I’d let her down. Crazy stuff: Forgot to wait for me after English, twice. Forgot I am allergic to strawberries, twice.”
“Jesus.”
“But I feel like the real reason wasn’t even on there.”
“What was the real reason?”
“I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn’t perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and a bit of a liar. Which was fine by me. It just wasn’t fine by her. She got rid of me because I knew she wasn’t perfect. It made me wonder about you.”
“About me? Why?”
“Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit. If she punished a friend of a few months by throwing herself down a flight of stairs, what would she do to a man who was dumb enough to marry her?”
I hung up as one of Hilary’s kids picked up the second extension and began singing a nursery rhyme. I immediately phoned Tanner and relayed my conversations with Hilary and Tommy.
“So we have a couple of stories, great,” Tanner said, “this’ll really be great!” in a way that told me it wasn’t that great. “Have you heard from Andie?”
I hadn’t.
“I have one of my people waiting for her at her apartment building,” he said. “Discreet.”
“I didn’t know you had people.”
“What we really need is to find Amy,” he said, ignoring me. “Girl like that, I can’t imagine she’d be able to stay hidden for too long. You have any thoughts?”
I kept picturing her on a posh hotel balcony near the ocean, wrapped in a white robe thick as a rug, sipping a very good Montrachet, while she tracked my ruin on the Internet, on cable, in the tabloids. While she enjoyed the endless coverage and exultation of Amy Elliott Dunne. Attending her own funeral. I wondered if she was self-aware enough to realize: She’d stolen a page from Mark Twain.